Check out the trailer for James Gunn’s evil Superman horror film, BrightBurn

Some may remember during SDCC last year that director James Gunn was scheduled to announce a new film that had nothing to do with Marvel. The project would be something that would bring him back to his horror roots. A teaser image was released and fans quickly jumped to the conclusion that the image was the Curse Mark from the anime Berzerk. Unfortunately, there was the whole debacle with James Gunn’s past tweets, which resulted in him getting fired from Guardians of the Galaxy. And no one ever got to find out what his mystery film was. Over the weekend, the first trailer for the long forgotten movie finally dropped out of nowhere, and as it turns out, it’s not a Berzerk movie. It’s actually a “What if kid Superman was evil?” horror movie called BrightBurn.

While James isn’t in director’s chair for this film, he did produce it, and directing it is one of Gunn’s longtime collaborators, David Yarovesky. The film also reunites Elizabeth Banks with Gunn, who worked on his cult classic horror film Slither. Banks will play the role of evil pseudo-Superman’s mother.
She and her husband, who live in a small farm one day find a young boy in the crashed alien ship. Tell me if you’ve heard this one? The obvious difference is that when they try to teach him to use his powers for good, they find that there is an evil force growing inside him.

It’s an absolutely ingenious idea. It’s part superhero movie, part horror movie, and judging by the trailer, it really seems to work.

The first thing that came to our mind following the trailer was the thought that Mark Millar must be grinding his teeth overseeing this trailer because he too has a movie that is a twist on classic superhero tale. Nemesis, which has been in development for far too long, is roughly a story about “what if Batman was evil?” The story is about an extremely wealthy man within a normal world that becomes so bored that he becomes the world’s one and only supervillain. Something tells us if Brightburn does well, then maybe the gears will begin to move on the Nemesis movie too.

It’s worth mentioning that James Gunn has yet to say anything about the release of the trailer. His twitter page has been completely silent since the whole Twitter scandal.